Draw the Line in Ohio: Interview with the Authors

The tenuous progress made by some states towards ending partisan gerrymandering over the years has been thrown into sharp reverse in the last few years. Rory Riley Topping and Josh Rultenberg, in their book Draw the Line in Ohio, use their time reporting on failed efforts of citizens to end the scourge of Republican gerrymandering to draw lessons that citizens can learn from everywhere. To learn more about their new book, we met with Rory and Josh ahead of their new book release. We learned that more than anything, the abuse of a disengaged citizenry by Republican lawmakers was to blame for failure in Ohio. We also learned that Rory and Josh are still fiercely determined.

Why Ohio? Why gerrymandering?

Draw the Line in Ohio centers on one state’s story. One that generalizes to the national stage. Importantly, Ohio has had multiple ballot initiatives aimed at solving gerrymandering with mixed results. Initiatives in 2015 and 2018, aimed at increasing bipartisanship and transparency by utilizing a quasi-legislative commission, were voted on by the people. Both passed. This commission includes seven members: the governor, auditor, secretary of state, and two legislative appointees from each party^[1]. This is the current system, and with the governor, auditor, secretary of state all currently being Republicans, the Democrats have little voice in the map making process. This tension came to a head several times as the Supreme Court of Ohio called the maps unconstitutional. The Democrats on the commission eventually capitulated to the gerrymandered maps in order to have an election^[2]. A 2024 initiative, run by Citizens Not Politicians as a citizen-led ballot initiative, offered a different approach – a citizen-led commission chosen by retired judges in the state to draw the maps^[3]. This was defeated in the ballot box after contentious litigation about the verbiage of the amendment, developed by then Secretary of State Frank LaRose who sits on the current map-making commission, at the ballot box in 2024^[4]. 

For Rory and Josh, this issue came to their attention years before the current gerrymandering scuffle across the country. Rory is a lawyer, legal analyst, and author who worked in all three branches of the federal government before turning to outside advocacy. Josh spent 15 years as a political journalist, including two years at the Ohio Statehouse from 2020 to 2022, assigned to cover the state's newly formed redistricting commission "day in and day out." The two were paired by their news outlet — Josh reporting, Rory translating the legal complexity — and the partnership outlasted the assignment. "The last census took place in 2020, which was just like a crazy time for everybody," Rory said, and the parties were more invested in redistricting than in previous cycles. Watching up close, the two started joking that somebody should write a book about it. "Finally it got to the point where it was like, nobody knows this topic better than we do," Rory said. Josh put it more bluntly: it wasn't hard to see that a story in one state legislature was a preview of what was coming everywhere else, "because even though we only had access to one state legislature in front of our eyes, it's not hard to envision that this is happening everywhere."

That preview has become the plot of the last two years. Rory argues the state has long been a testing ground, stating "so goes Ohio, so goes the nation.” "They're testing things here," she said. "They're seeing what they can do and what they can get away with, and they're going to copy that in other states depending on what the results are." She points to language in Ohio's constitution requiring maps to reflect the statewide proportion of Republican and Democratic voters "to the best of their ability." Florida's constitution also contains such language. Many assumed courts would strike down maps that plainly violated such language in Ohio, and the maps continued to get worse in 2025 when the state did mid-decade redistricting. "We learned from Ohio, maybe the language isn't as clear as we thought it was," Rory said, pointing to court orders that were ignored or decided along predictably partisan lines. That lesson has played out nationally: Texas, California, Missouri, North Carolina, Utah, and Ohio itself all finalized new mid-decade congressional maps in 2025 and 2026, a wave unusual outside the normal post-census cycle^[5].

This story isn't without successes. While Ohio has not defeated its gerrymander, other states like Michigan have. Voters there passed Proposal 2 in 2018 with 61 percent support, creating a 13-member independent citizens commission (four Republicans, four Democrats, five unaffiliated) that now draws the state's legislative and congressional lines^[6]. Josh sees that contrast as instructive: "The most powerful person in any state isn't one of its elected officials," he said, quoting a line the two use often in the book. "It's an engaged voter who refuses to look away." 

Josh argues Ohio's 2024 defeat wasn't really a failure of the idea, but of the process being hijacked. The Ohio Ballot Board, chaired by Secretary of State Frank LaRose approved language describing the amendment in terms Citizens Not Politicians called "biased, inaccurate, deceptive." Importantly, the group even sued the state about the language^[7]. Exit interviews, Josh said, showed voters walking out of the polls excited to have voted to end gerrymandering only to learn they'd voted no. "It's like you just voted against your own self-interest and you don't even know it," he said. This tells a worrying story: good faith attempts to end gerrymandering can be defeated by bad faith actors. 

What do we do about the gerrymander?

Rory has been making the case for solutions in print as well as in the book. In a recent piece for The Hill, she argued that the courts aren't going to save voters from gerrymandering. It's up to them. She cites a Wall Street Journal report quoting Eric Holder, chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, on why both parties have poured money into state judicial elections: because state legislatures don't have the final say on maps, courts do. "The broader national impact, which is incredibly disappointing to me as an attorney, is we see decisions that are very much grounded in politics," Rory said, arguing that judicial reasoning often just tracks a court's partisan makeup.

Josh is careful to say there's no silver bullet. "There's no one right answer to solve gerrymandering," he said. "If there was, then we wouldn't be having this conversation." Among the ideas he and Rory say deserve serious consideration: uncapping the U.S. House beyond its current 435 seats, letting voters self-select their district, proportional representation that would award multiple representatives per district roughly matching the vote split, and independent redistricting commissions nationwide. In a previous piece, Rory provided the idea of a congressional legislative commission on gerrymandering to address our voting system and find a new way^[8]. None are perfect, Josh said, "but they're certainly a lot better than the status quo."

What "fair" actually means, though, is where the agreement breaks down. Asked whether Republicans and Democrats share any common ground on redistricting, Rory said everybody agrees, in the abstract, that they want fair districts and to keep communities of interest together. The disagreement is in the definition. "That's kind of the sticking point right now," she said. "On paper everybody says, 'Yes, of course I want fair districts.' But then when you ask people, what does fairness look like for you? That's where we see this divergence." Her proposed test: "Would I be mad if the other side did this? And if the answer is yes, then you probably shouldn't be doing it." Looking at Ohio's history, she noted the pattern flips depending on who holds power: "people who are for gerrymandering are the ones in power, but as soon as they're out of power, they're against it."

Reaching the voters

Both authors argue the nonpartisan framing matters as much as the policy fix. "Stop having that conversation" about red versus blue, Josh said. In the book, he and Rory reach for pop-culture analogies to make the point land without a partisan label attached. "If you simply have the fight Democrat versus Republican, then the Democrats and Republicans will run to their corners," he said. "But if we change the conversation to fairness versus cheating, and you don't put a partisan label on it, people inherently will run towards fairness." He illustrated the stakes with Maryland, where a 2025 Democratic push aimed to eliminate the state's last Republican-held U.S. House seat: with more than a million registered Republicans in a state of roughly 4 million voters, he asked, "what would you tell" the Republicans left with no representation at all?

Rory's version of the pitch is more irreverent: "Don't be a dyspeptic hothead", a nod to Elbridge Gerry, the Massachusetts governor whose name gave gerrymandering its own, who she said was known in his time as "a grouchy, irrational decision maker." She and Josh also lean on a comparison from an old CNN segment likening mid-decade redistricting to Star Wars: "You should never be rooting for Darth Vader," Josh said. "May the force of fair maps be with you."

Asked whether the two parties' mapmakers might find common ground without the pressure of an arms race, Josh didn't pretend there was an easy answer: "I feel like if they had things in common, we wouldn't be having this conversation." What people can build around instead, both authors argued, is engagement itself. "When the public is paying attention, that's when the lawmakers fold," Josh said, drawing on his years covering both Congress and the Ohio Statehouse. "Outside of that, all they do is work in their own special interest."

Coalition building, voter education

Ohio's 2024 defeat drew Republicans and Democrats onto the same side of the ballot measure, and Rory argues the lesson is less about that single loss than about what the coalition does next. She cites Yuval Levin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who has argued American politics used to be organized around durable coalitions that held for a decade or more, allowing lasting policy change; however, this dynamic has shifted to whatever can be done to get the narrowest of majorities. "They're not focused on coalition building. They're just focused on winning," Rory said of that shift. She pointed to Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, who told the authors the 2024 coalition has held together and will "come back stronger", a continuity Rory said matters more than the loss itself. "It's kind of like the tortoise and the hare," she said. "You've got to be slow and steady to win the race."

Civic education, both authors argued, has to come before that kind of durable coalition can form. Rory pointed to Miller's account of why so many Ohioans were misled by the 2024 ballot language: most voters didn't know what the Ohio Ballot Board was, didn't know the ballot language differed from the amendment's actual text, and weren't aware of the litigation over it. "It's not only that people need knowledge, but they need civic education to be able to put that knowledge in context," Rory said. "And then they also need motivation to do something about it." She pointed to Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2024 visit to Columbus for the Citizens Not Politicians campaign, where his message was to get off the couch. "You can't change the world from your couch," Rory said. "Even if you're outraged by this, if you don't translate that knowledge into action, nothing is going to change."

Mutually assured democracy

For all the state-level detail, the authors return again and again to a single, uncomfortable observation: neither national party is currently willing to disarm first. Josh noted Republicans, who control the White House, House, and Senate, could pass legislation which would curb partisan gerrymandering and create independent commissions if they wanted to end the standoff; instead, they haven't. Democrats backing that idea also have House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries vowing to "fight fire with fire." "If you fight fire with fire, you don't put out the flames," Josh said. "You just burn the whole house down." Yet, the authors did not deny the divergent records of Democrats and Republicans on gerrymandering.

He's skeptical that tit-for-tat even works on its own terms. He pointed to what political scientists call "dummymandering" when a map drawn to lock in one party's advantage backfires as the electorate shifts underneath it. They point out Texas's 2025 map, built around 2024 turnout, to illustrate this point, given how immigration enforcement may be reshaping the voters Republicans relied on in the most recent election. Even in the best case scenario for Democrats, retaking the House does nothing to break a Senate filibuster that's kept a 60-seat majority out of reach for decades. "What will this race to the bottom have proven?" he asked. "It will have proven absolutely nothing. And we will stay in this country's doom loop."

Rory's closing argument is that no reform idea should be dismissed just because of who proposed it. "All ideas deserve to be tested on the merits," she said, noting the United States is the only major democracy that draws districts quite this way, and that other countries' models are worth studying. Josh offered a reminder that the boldest-sounding fixes have succeeded before: "One thing that seemed extreme at one time was one person, one vote," he said. "Here we are in 2026, imagine, calling for it again. We might have it in practice, but gerrymandering is taking away one vote."

The book 

Draw the Line in Ohio releases September 15. The authors say the book draws on a wide cast of voices beyond their own reporting and situates Ohio's fight within a longer conversation on the subject. Rory and Josh continue the conversation on Instagram at @mind.themaps, with Rory on X at @RileyTopping and Josh at @JRultenberg. Their message, half joke and half marching order: the maps get made whether or not anyone's watching, so watch.